…the musings of Melissa Billington, creatrix of MYOGA Freedom Online Yoga School & PocaHAUNTus–shapeshifting history into HerStory, & co-host of WhitePeople Whispering, as she connects with the land, water and fellow critters round this glorious globe!

snow-eyed view, in Sverige

This is stream-of-consciousness writing to get me back on the page, as it were, as I’ve been overwhelmed by change lately. Here’s an audio version for those who prefer to listen or have both written & spoken together. Or if you like a musical soundtrack, here’s a bit of Aotearoa homegrown with Dark Days by Fat Freddy’s Drop.

Can I just say I am often filled with doubt. Which then causes me to doubt myself. I have this idea that if I am evolved & awake, then I will never doubt. My faith will be unshakeable. Yet I only seem to know because my ground is shaken, that there is a depth that is even more unshakeable than this.

Earthquakes wake us up to our feet on the ground, our foundations, our fears of not being held in our sleep. Our frightened inner children. For there are many. And they keep us on our toes. Until we feel something even bigger move. Like the earth. Then we recalibrate our sense of mortality & fallibility. Then we doubt.

So I seem to be seeking stronger ground, more solid rock. The granite boulders of Sverige. Trevligt. Which sound nothing like they’re written, at least to my eye. So I can’t even trust my eyes fully here. Everything comes up into question. Is this really what I think it is? Doubt again.

And how do I go about having a row with doubt?

In n out, in n out, round about, no need to shout, find it out.

Clear it out. Then go in.

Or, go in. Then clear it out.

Doubt is 3rd eye, first eye, inner eye, confused with “I”?

Cloud-cover over vision.

Distraction draws down attention, dimming diving accuracy’s success.

Staying clear in poor conditions is a skill. A constant monitoring of the screens. Are they blurred somehow? Inner fog from Johnny’s song? Outer splatter from the clouds that gathered? Snow oblivion in soft white dust? Coastal waves whipped over the manmade marina barriers to keep the ocean’s lashing tongues out? Sometimes storms are so severe as to be in-navigable. Your best bet is pulling over, waiting it out. Waiting for the weather to clear.

When you’re first blinded you halt to a slow, then stop.

Without your eyes, how do you know what’s what & where’s where?

How can you know what to do?

When your weather obscures You?

Be still. Be the one steady thing in the swirling mix, somehow not bent or broken by it, but oddly strengthened.

Be re-stamina-fied by the wild ride of the storm of structural disolution, systemic denial, & short-sighted drift.

Now we’re drained. Is it true that that which we fear most, we are–at our deepest depth–an essence of?

Why fear seeing something in ourselves? Because it’ll stir up Doubt about our very identities. If I could be capable of doing or being or saying That, then who am I? Can I be all that I had thought I was?, even if I can somehow relate to all needs, as horrific as they seem?

Well, and this is deep stuff. Yet I’m also talkin bout how to buy the milk. The confusion, the doubt, that enters the picture on a regular rhythm each day in a new country–the conversions necessary to understand time, speed, cost (often relative to Value, or is it?) distance, heat. Or, more often, cold–at least according to far-north humans.

Or the tones of things. Did that woman just roll her eyes at me or am I imagining it? Do I just not speak the eye language around here yet? Was that argument angry or just Latino in expression? It stirs up many of my childhood fears of not knowing how to interpret the sounds I hear. Which is what I love about my dogson Dio.

He’s also an Aries & he cocks his one ear up high (I’m guessing many dogs do this, no?) to listen, to discern the message behind what he hears. I’m the same. I’ll cock my “good” ear up to focus my hearing on the sound. Or in the direction being indicated by the person who can hear it, even though I can’t, yet.

So, to some extent the disorientation of a diminished sense is familiar. Family-are. I’m accustomed to hearing differently than others, so when I consider how it would be with sight–

–& I did this when I was younger, laying out my clothes for the day, all with my eyes closed but a photographic memory of where my things were, & a sensitized sense of touch. I could discern fabrics by feel–

–So, yeah, when I consider how it is to pull back on vision, I find other senses heighten. Still, though, vision is such a valued gift, as well as skill, that, like I said way back up there, that when it first happens–that your vision is altered–you slow, then stop, in order to reassess, reorient, & maybe even wait it out, If it’s that severe.
And I feel this is what many are doing re: the weather. I know I feel that in myself. That sense of waiting for it to be consistent for more than a day or so, so I know what season we’re in. But I don’t like waiting & that’s not what’s happening. More & more, & in more & more places around the globe, the weather is consistently inconsistent. The flora & fauna are following each cue, as quickly as they can. Some, not all. But most are chopping & changing. I keep wondering, what’s the advantage of this? This spin cycle of the seasons we’re going through, what good does it do everything? And, selfishly, me, I want to know how the continuation of a greater rate of change in the environment will affect my own internal environment.
Partly the pilgrimage I’ve been making these past 3 years has helped me to grow more lean in my baggage, on all levels. There are all-ways more layers to this onion of existence. Until there are none. And all. As one. Anyway, having less & moving more has increased my recalibration rate. This is something you’re seeing in human plant/animals too–the instagram craze of people having lifestyles that I’m sure have names to them, but essentially look like mine (except I suspect they are actually making money!, but who knows). The wandering ones. There’s a certain mindset that evolves when you’re steeped in that place of doubt brought on by travel, no matter how many snazzy tools & toys you have with you. Essentially you are in a foreign land. I consider travel to unknown places about the closest we get to death while still alive.

Because beyond the form of this one body, my vehicle in this one lifetime, I don’t know–can’t prove definitively–what happens. Just like traveling to a place where you have no idea where roads lead or what certain gestures indicate or what meaning they’re exchanging between them that might involve you. But right now you can’t know so you blithely carry on, & partly it’s your child-like unknowing that protects you.

There’s a faith that is not put-on, that children have. They walk out into the world without’n a clue–step right onto the highway, eat deep of the dog shit, climb up without skill yet to get down, marry the wrong men. Ok, I’m getting a little ahead of myself with that last one. As children, they trust. They can do no other. And this is what I find when I go abroad. I am thrown into that place of having to trust myself, yet beyond that to trust in mySelf, the over-soul or whateveryouwannacallit that Knows.

So I like to say a prayer of gratitude as often as I can,

for another day,

another delay,

another soul connection,

another surprise rejection.

All of it. Thank you. A thousand thanks.

Is this my bedrock then?

Maybe not this land. Maybe, but maybe not.

Beyond that earth’s surface layer is the inner layer, of what is my own bedrock.